Would You Pay $4,500 to Avoid a Car Dealership?

So you're probably saying, whoa, wait,

Carvana sells new cars? Let's start there because if you haven't been paying close attention to the automotive industry, you may not know this is happening.

Carvana spent the last, what, about 13 years building its business around used cars in a very unique model.

You go online, you find a car, you can get financing if you need it.

You can even sell them your old car, do all the paperwork.

and either have the car delivered to your house or pick it up from one of their giant car vending machines, which you may have seen on the side of the road.

They're really interesting.

But new cars are a different story.

The United States has franchise laws that strictly govern how new cars are sold.

That's why spinoff companies like Scout, which is part of Volkswagen Group, is going through a lot of legal battles because they want to sell direct to consumers and not have franchise dealerships.

And the dealers are suing their butts off for it because this is the model that exists in the United States under franchise law.

So if Carvana wants to sell these new cars, they need to have an actual franchised dealership.

And that's exactly what they've started doing.

Carvana bought its first new car dealership in February of 2025 in Arizona, and it is a Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram store.

And since then, they have acquired additional Stellantis brand dealerships in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, and Georgia.

At this point, they have seven new car dealerships, this point being the end of August of 2026.

And they're all selling these Stellantis brands, your Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram.

And at some locations, Fiat.

Yes, they still sell Fiats in a few places in the U.S. Carvana is doing something particularly interesting, especially at their dealership in Dallas, Texas.

Just this past June, they opened what it calls a new car test drive center because they figured out that people actually want to test drive new cars before they make a decision on what they're going to buy.

And they didn't want them test driving them at other dealerships.

So at the Dallas store, you can go there, you can look at the cars, you can touch them, you can sit in them, you can compare them.

You can scan little QR codes to get more information about them and you can test drive them.

They do have employees there to help you, but there are no traditional salespeople.

There's no F&I, you know, finance office.